Sure, L.A. is “Hollywood” in the way Detroit is the “Motor City.” But movie production is moving elsewhere.
Los Angeles is to movies what Detroit is to cars—not as productive as you think they are.
FilmLA, the municipal organization that provides permitting for film and TV productions in the city, has reported that in January—after the 61-day WGA strike and the 118-day SAG-AFTRA strike against the AMTPT, when it would seem there would be massive pent-up filming demand—the number of shoot days was down 26% compared with January 2023.
And 2023 was arguably an abysmal year.
When FilmLA president Paul Audley released a 2023-in-review assessment he said: “History offers no point of comparison to the present. The pandemic year aside, we have to look very far back – farther back than permit records allow – to find a time when production levels stayed so low, for so long.”
That’s bad.
Overall, the number of shooting days in 2023 in LA dropped 34.4 percent compared with 2022.
To be sure, the strikes did have an outsized effect that dragged down the numbers. When you have things like TV Drama production between October through December ’23 being down 91.3 percent, TV comedy off 85.6 percent and feature films down 57.5 percent, it is nearly impossible to make up for that.
However, there is something that should be a bit of a red flag: the filming of commercials—which the strikes did not affect—were down 9.9 percent. Arguably product purveyors still wanted to move their wares. Perhaps they decided to do it elsewhere.
FilmLA recently released its “2022 Sound Stage Study” (evidently takes some time to run the numbers).
It has participation from 17 studios, which own 34 facilities, which equals 83 percent of all of the 6.5 million square feet of stage space in LA. They filmed 1,354 projects in these facilities in 2022. . .and 1,700 in 2019.
The good news, however, is that they shot 98 feature films in 2022 compared with 93 in 2019.
But whereas there were 407 full- and half-hour TV series made in LA in 2022, there were 463 in 2019, a reduction of 56 shows.
One might think that TV shows would be bigger given not only the increased demand of streaming channels since 2019, but because the California Film Commission’s Film & Television Tax Credit Program 3.0 is television intensive, as 17 percent ($56,100,000) of its funding is for relocating TV series and 40 percent($132,000,000), its single-largest category, is for new TV series, recurring, pilots, and mini-series.
Of course, films get the rest of the funding from the state, as in $115,500,000 for feature films; $15,840,000 for independent films with budgets <$10,000,000; $10,560,000 for indies >$10,000,000.
So it’s 57 percent for TV and 43 percent for films.
The methodology that the CFC uses largely predicates on projects that will provide the most jobs and economic activities in the state, which is why the decrease in filming should be cause for concern.
The 2023 Otis College report on the creative economy in California shows that in the L.A. area the entertainment industry accounted for some one million jobs and provided $114 billion in labor income and $38 billion in tax revenues. Which is why that’s important to the likes of FilmLA.
But there is burgeoning global competition. The Otis report acknowledges “Rising costs at home are partly to blame”—doing business in California isn’t cheap—but goes on to cite things like the state of New York’s $25-million tax credit program for digital game development and India’s project to create two million jobs in “Visual Effects, Gaming, Comics, and Extended Reality” category—which essentialy sounds like a definition of the Marvel Universe—over the next few years.
What’s more, the U.K. is offering incentives up to 25 percent for film production there and Ontario, Canada, is putting up to 40 percent on the table.
Of course, there is the issue of the availability of things like sound stages in various locales to do more than location shots.
Which brings us back to the FilmLA soundstage study.
In 2023 LA had 6.5 million square feet of what FilmLA considers “certified” stage space.
But the U.K. has 6.6 million square feet.
Georgia—which offers an array of tax incentives that would make CPAs salivate (e.g., 20 percent base transferable tax credit; 10 percent uplift for using a Georgia logo and a link to Georgia.org/Film)—has 4.1 million square feet.
But consider: in 2016 LA had 4.7 million square feet of sound stages, so the increase from then to 2023 was 38 percent.
Yet in the U.K., it went from 3.5 million square feet to 6.6 million square feet, or an 88 percent increase.
And in Georgia it is a whopping 242 percent increase, from 1.2 million square feet in 2016 to 4.1 million square feet.
Which brings us back to the analogy between L.A. and Detroit.
They don’t build a a whole lot of vehicles built in the Motor City. Stellantis has two plants in Detroit, where it built 244,594 Grand Cherokees and 69,196 Dodge Durangos in 2023. General Motors has one plant in Detroit, which built 3,244 HUMMER EVs and 461 Chevy Silverado EVs in all of 2023.
Meanwhile, Toyota’s plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, not the first place you think of when you think “automotive,” produced 433,848 Camrys in 2023—or 116,353 more vehicles than Detroit.
All of which means that at some point Los Angeles may be the movie capitol, but studios will invest much of the movie capital elsewhere.